04/15/2026
A 20-acre New Jersey estate built with Titanic inheritance money just hit the market for the first time in 75 years...
Tower Hill Farm in Middletown, New Jersey, is listed at $10 million, marking its first time on the open market since 1949. The estate was built in the 1920s for Herbert N. Straus, whose parents, Isidor and Ida Straus, were co-owners of Macy's department store and famously died together aboard the RMS Titanic in 1912. They were last seen refusing lifeboats, choosing to stay with each other as the ship went down. Their deaths left Herbert with both a fortune and a grief that shaped the rest of his life.
Herbert and his brother Percy had purchased 100 acres of adjoining farmland in Middletown in 1908, originally for dairy cows and polo ponies. After their parents' death, Herbert commissioned architect Alfred Hopkins to design a compound in the style of a French Norman chateau. The gardens were laid out by Martha Brookes Hutcheson, one of America's first female landscape architects. The estate features Gothic arches, ivy-covered stone courtyards, a clock tower, Ludowici tile roofs, hand-carved oak doors, and interconnecting pebble driveways. Herbert died in 1933 before the estate was fully completed.
Today, the 20-acre property includes five residences, a small barn with horse paddocks, a pool, a tennis court, original stone fountains, and granite hitching posts. The surrounding meadows and tree lines remain unbroken. A family named McConnell purchased the estate from the Straus family in 1949 for $35,000 and multiple generations have lived there since, making the current listing only the third ownership change in nearly a century. The listing is handled by Heritage House Sotheby's International Realty, and listing agent Kelly Zaccaro has described walking the property as feeling like stepping into an old French village.
Some estates sell you a house. This one sells you a century of American history with a Titanic connection that no amount of money can replicate.
